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Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienatingDrupal - Open Source CMS the community that so far has driven their success.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.

“2008 is starting with a bang for open source,” wrote Mark Radcliffe last week, and he’s not wrong. Not only did we see Sun’s $1bn acquisition of MySQL, but we’ve also seen an extraordinary amount of venture capital funding. Today saw no fewer than three investments announced, with Greenplum landing $27m Series C, Zenoss closing a $11m Series B round, and Alfresco announcing a $9m Series C round.

The slowdown in venture capital funding for Linux and open source-related vendors continued in the third quarter as disclosed funding deals were down 41.6% to $77.8m*, compared to $133.3m in the same quarter last year.

While it is good news that significant amounts are being invested in open source vendors, there has been a decrease in the amount of funds invested in Series A rounds, suggesting that “the VC industry has filled the checkerboard and has moved to something else as far as startups are concerned”